Really interesting interview of Arthur Breitman, the lead developer of Tezos.
Tezos is one big leap forward in the direction of Tau. It has a lot of common points with Tau. For instance, the protocol is self amending following a very similar process to Tau that is also inspired by the nomic game. Nomic is actually being discussed in the interview. Another important similarity is the use of a custom functional language practical enough to develop with and that comes with built-in formal verification capabilities, the goal being to ship code with a mathematical proof of its properties. Another very similar aspect and that is beautifully well explained in the interview is that blockchain networks are essentially all following the same protocol at a very high level, when you abstract specific details like the exact nature of the state that is being validated, and the exact way that the canonical version is being discriminated, blockchains are essentially all doing the same thing, so Tezos is coming with built-ins that can handle all the low level stuff like i/os as well as generic blockchain mechanics, and all the specific blockchain rules are left for the users to decide in the genesis block (they call it "seed protocol") and subsequent protocol amendments. This allows Tezos to implement Bitcoin, Ethereum and any other blockchain. Even the idea of writing program specifications as a set of constraints and letting the compiler come up with an implementation that is guaranteed to meet the constraints is addressed. A last thing: Breitman alludes at some point to the fact Ethereum is doing a mistake by attempting to be a "universal computer" that can compute everything, and explains that a blockchain network doesn't need full spectrum computation and that a subset of what Ethereum can do is sufficient. Although he doesn't point specifically to concepts such as turing completeness and decidability, and doesn't state where Tezos stands on that aspect, it sure seems like he is referring to that but keeping things simple to avoid perplexing the non-technical audience. Is Tezos decidable too?

Now, that makes a hell lot of common points with Tau, doesn't it? And they are planning to release this year!
Ohad, are you following Tezos closely enough? What's your take on their technology?